The avenue beyond the gateway was framed not by stonework rows of stone pillars, but by sixty-arm-length statues hewn from the living trunks of pre-flood ginkgo and cedar giant statues.
They didn’t stand upon dressed stone bases or stepped marble stepped stone bases. Each statue was rooted directly into the ancient soil, its lower draperies merging seamlessly with the buttressed flutes of stone-hard roots that spread across the roadbed in vast, waving waves. Where the chisels of the ancient foresters had shaped the wood, the grain remained clean. Swirling patterns of heartwood, dark amber growth rings, and hardened cambium that had turned to semi-clear stone while preserving every fiber of its original living texture.
Qiao Ming walked slowly down the center of the avenue, his bare calloused feet drinking in the complex tactile terrain of the forest floor. The ground was composed of fine, powdered amber mixed with tightly packed moss-peat that had stone-hardened over thousand years into a dense, tough stone floor. With every step, his broad toes splayed and gripped, finding immediate purchase in the micro-crevices of the stone-hard root-swell.
The air between the wooden giants was still and cool, scented with the dry sweetness of dried leaves, cured pitch, and the faint, stone sharpness of limestone water. Above their heads, the interlocked canopies of the huge trees met thirty arm-lengths higher, forming a ribbed wooden ceiling through which filtered the gentle, constant green eerie glow of the upper moss glades.
